WordPress Widget Boilerplate

A Widget is a piece of PHP Code which will run when it is placed inside a Sidebar. A good example of a widget is data displayed in the sidebar of a blog. Like this blog I use widgets to display the Google badge, Twitter Feed and Facebook like box.

Having these as Widgets mean I can place them in multiple places of the WordPress theme directly in the WordPress dashboard.
You can create a WordPress widget to do anything you want, the easiest way to create a WordPress widget is to inherit the WP_Widget class. This way you can use the inbuilt functions to update the widget, display the widget and create an admin page for the widget.

Below is the boilerplate of a WordPress widget, when you create a new widget just copy and paste the below code as a starting point for your Widget.